a spring prayer

The process of death and the process of birth are very similar. The difference is who is waiting on the other side.

Christiane Northrup, M.D.

In November I made the profoundly wrong decision to winter in New Mexico.  I didn’t realize at the time that I was choosing a state that would order some of the strictest government mandates that remain in place some 5 months later (and counting).

There’s a crummy walking path nearby that I go to less often than I should. Walking is my preferred exercise, but I’ve developed agoraphobia from encountering so many masked people outside.  The government mandate, unsubstantiated by any peer-reviewed scientific studies, states that one is required to wear a mask outside only if one cannot maintain 6 feet of distance from others, but people who are more interested in moral posturing, with its correlative gesture of shaming, cannot be bothered to 1) read the emergency order (which is currently being challenged in court) or 2) keep their opinions to themselves.  Today a bicyclist felt it was within his scope to make me feel ashamed for wanting to breathe oxygen while I am exercising.  The hand gesture he made as he biked away was contrary to reason as only men can masturbate that way.

Perhaps the only thing I’ve consistently found in New Mexico are a few healers who support my healing from past trauma.  A pattern that repeats from birth until sometime within the past 6 -12 months is my surprising willingness to accept certain other’s definitions of how I should behave.  By this I don’t mean government authorities, or any authority figures for whom I harbor a deep and abiding animosity.  I mean going along to get along with friends, lovers, and relatives.  However, given how easily they have at various moments shut the door on me, I can see now how those were substandard relationships.  My acceptance of their conditions spoke more to my loneliness/fear of solitude than to whether their scanty affections served to fulfill my needs and desires.

It’s quite humbling to have more years behind one than ahead and realize that there have been only one or two relationships that truly supported me.  All of the rest were contingent on me not making someone uncomfortable with my opinions or behaviors.  Part of my healing now involves affirming what I value every day.  That includes believing that I am responsible for my health as others are for theirs and that human relationships should not be negotiated through the transhumanist terms dictated by such players as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Tech, and Big Pharma.

If people who acted as if they cared for me in the past would only do so based on conditions that might change at any moment, what benefit would I derive from looking for solace in such communities as Santa Fe or the state of New Mexico or the government of the United States or the corporate-captured global community?  And yet that’s what I’m being told to do when I am harassed to wear a useless mask, shelter in place, and get vaccinated.  “We’re all in this together,” the electronic billboards posted along the highways hum.

No matter how many times it’s repeated, a lie remains a lie.  People such as that bicyclist have not have their worlds ripped apart.  They’ve been telecommuting and zooming, ordering from Amazon and Instacart, and putting a mask on or not being able to take a cruise are their only inconveniences.  Some, frankly, have been waiting a long time for some “older and wiser” figure who looks adult-like to tell them to wear a mask and give up their freedoms.  Freedom after all is quite exhausting.

Perhaps at this historical moment there are more people like them than are like me.  That’s what the powers-that-be are counting on.  But one day that could just as easily be different.  If they think they are immune, they are fooling themselves.

Sadly, schadenfreude projected into the future is not an emotion that’s going to sustain me.  What I would prefer, as Dr. Northrup’s quotation above implies, is to have been born into a world where one is welcomed by a community with love and support for what one brings to the world – one’s unique self – and not marked as being a biosecurity risk.  Short of that, I’m still holding out hope that there are still some people who feel the same and that one day our paths will cross, maskless.

Honoring our ancestors

My fellow human beings. I have worked so hard to learn how to love you. I have observed you for many decades and wondered how you operated. I have felt the deep pain of your rejection and have been blessed with the indescribable joy of love and understanding from a few amazing souls.

From the deep well of the solitude in which I was cast this past year, I have been wracked with pain knowing how many of you were ill-equipped to deal with the loneliness you were needlessly asked to endure on behalf of others as well as with the economic devastation and paralyzing fear that comes with having no role to play in the world.

Now in my modest way I begin to determine how to share what I know is true. The few people left willing to pretend to listen tell me they are too busy to listen. Nevertheless, the truth can’t be denied: the coronavirus “vaccine” is an experimental drug and is quickly killing people. We are not supposed to know this; it’s “disinformation” and people who repeat this information will be ridiculed rather that addressed with scientific facts.  That science has always been politically used is what people have been taught to forget.  Google Galileo.

I am so distraught not only for where we are right now — in a trance induced by fear, a trance whose spell has been carefully choreographed over many decades — but for where we will be when the truth is revealed. How will people deal with the intense guilt they experience over injecting their children with an experimental drug that causes permanent damage? How will people handle the guilt of knowing their elderly were among the first to die in assisted living facilities and nursing homes from this injection which is unlike any vaccine that has ever been developed or so widely and rapidly deployed in the name of “getting back to normal”?

I do not want anyone to approach me in the years to come and say, “I wish I had listened to you.” I have no need to be validated for what I have to say. I also, I must add, have no reason to care overly since I long ago decided the world was headed too far in the wrong direction for me to think any more human children were necessary.  My family of origin is dissolved; my best friend is dead.

But people are dying from an experimental drug and I, for one, am not going to stand back and pretend I don’t know what I clearly must and do know. I want as many of us as possible to be on the right side of history.

 

A worker in the struggle for light and love

on with the show

Dear Friend. 

Thanks for your e-mail.  I’m still in Santa Fe with George & Chesapeake.  Besides the fur crew, I have one friend – my acupuncturist.  That’s not enough for a dinner party.

I’m pretty distraught over the crack down on free speech and the divisiveness on ALL sides.  Santa Fe/NM’s covid BS was extreme over the holidays, and I’m one of the people who gets psychologically rattled when I see people wearing masks.  So, while I’m glad I’m not back in my former la-la-neoliberal land where complex thought has been replaced with “yes” or “no” buttons, it’s not much better here as far as I can discern.  But one cannot cut through the bullshit when everyone’s been told to slow the spread.

I am reading War and Peace finally.  Seems an especially apt way to begin coming to terms with the historic inevitability of big pharma, tech, and global corporate gangsters taking over the last vestiges of our human experience. 

(Every Princess Bride quote is one small tribute to Frank.)

I am also writing a fictional piece on my NPS experiences.  More examples of communities where one cannot make insecure people feel secure.  I’m tired of other people’s fears being the threshold beyond which no one is allowed to go.

Life is a risk.  Even Tolstoy would agree.

I’m pretty sure none of this will make sense.  That’s okay.  I’m getting used to it.

Best wishes,

Tamara

Morels!

It’s a compulsion I haven’t been able to indulge in for at least five years.

I realize this isn’t the greatest picture.  My tiny flip-phone, which already doesn’t take amazing pictures, downsized the image when I sent it.  Bah!

My obsession with morel hunting began in 2005.  I’d returned to Virginia the previous year and was working with a co-worker whose husband’s family had farmed along the mountains of what would come to be known as Shenandoah National Park.

When she shared this helpful rule, I was hooked:

“When the poplar leaves are the size of squirrel’s ears, it’s time to start hunting merkels.”

squirrel ear sized poplar leaf

We didn’t find morels that year although we raced through various landscapes trying to locate what we imagined would be the perfect environment for them.  That was part of the problem:  racing.  When you’re hunting for morels, you have to allow the world to narrow to four or five feet and slow to a glacial crawl.  What I recall of that first attempt was how we would crane our heads up to check if we were walking beneath tulip poplar trees and then look down at the forest floor.  It’s a surprising that we didn’t hurt ourselves during these dizzying tries, but we were younger then.

Another friend and I literally stumbled over morels 3 years later.  We ended up harvesting so many morels that I don’t really ever need to eat another one.  One night my boyfriend was late (again) to dinner so I ate the entire pound of morels in cream over croissants as a sort of revenge.  (see previous note on being younger)

These days, pandemic or no, I’m simply grateful for the gift the forest gives when a perfect morel reveals itself, its giggling barely muffled.  After a long winter and before the crowded vivacity of summer, the woods are a special domain, giving me the chance to stretch my muscles – slowly – and thrill in the signs of renewed life.  One of my favorite John Muir quotations captures this uniquely human understanding:

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

guardian spirits

reminders on how to breathe during an airborne toxic event

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII quoted in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Immortal”

 

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“How was class?” Denise said.

“It’s going so well they want me to teach another course.”

“In what?”

“Jack won’t believe this.”

“In what?” I said.

“Eating and drinking.  It’s called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters.  Which, I admit, is a little more stupid than it absolutely has to be.”

“What could you teach?” Denise said.

“That’s just it.  It’s practically inexhaustible.  Eat light foods in warm weather.  Drink plenty of fluids.”

“But everybody knows that.”

“Knowledge changes every day.  People like to have their beliefs reinforced.  Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal.  Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach.  If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating.  The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children.  We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes.  One day they just started appearing.  So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being.  I’m the closest they could find, that’s all.”

Don Delillo, White Noise

 

Babette, Jack’s wife and Denise’s mother, teaches a community class to the elderly in posture.  It seems just another layer of ridiculousness, but I’ve begun noticing how so many of us during this moment are doing … exactly the same thing.  It rather reminds me, sweetly, of the way our primate relatives pat each other in touching simplicity, sending the message that we are all in this together, that who you are matters to me, that your cares are mine and while I may not be able to make them disappear, I can utter familiar things that allay your anxieties for now.

Or as we murmur to each other and ourselves the ubiquitous expression, “You’ve got this.”

my quarantine

With special thanks to Gabriele Rausse